Today is Cinco de Mayo, another double number day and thus time to review my Groundhog Day Resolutions.
First, my efforts to become a calendar person.
I didn’t plan today on a calendar. I did plan yesterday on a calendar, but the day looked nothing like the plan. Monday was both planned and looked like the plan. I suspect the rest of the workweek will be somewhere between Monday and Tuesday. If that is true, this week will be very representative of where I am in terms of this identity.
I plan more days than not. I do items on the plan when they are scheduled more often than not. I do not, however, only deviate from planning with a reason. I don’t consider not working on fiction at 9:30 because I needed to go to the eye doctor unexpectedly for an appointment made for 9:00 after I planned today, not following the calendar. That is adjusting to changing needs.
I consider getting sucked into a YouTube video and its successor, so I didn’t write until 9:30 ignoring the calendar.
That is where I am. I’m finding I cannot start a scheduled day as early as I like. It has nothing to do with getting out of bed per se. I’m out when I planned to start the day, but I haven’t gotten from sleep to fully functional.
However, I plan out my day from roughly 8:00 to 18:00 most days at least four days a week. It is honored as much in the breach as in following it, but that is a huge change from who I was on February first.
The value of this planning is showing up in the second identity I am focusing on this year, being a writer. I have been scheduling writing times. As a result, this month I have written every day. I haven’t written fiction every day, but I have written 500 words at a minimum every day. I also wrote a little over half the A-Z challenge last month. I got derailed with the above-mentioned eye issue. In all that writing, I have got pieces of a new novel written and finished the first draft of another short story.
Like the identity of being a calendar person, I am doing better with being a writer.
The final identity was that of inviting luck with four components: daily work on mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical sides of life. While I have only a handful of days I get all four done, I have no days in the past thirty-one where I got none done. The most common pairing is getting two of the areas covered, usually mental, by writing down ten ideas and spiritual, via daily Scripture readings. I have gotten more success on exercise by building it into the daily calendar at a fixed time, as part of lunch.
My next step will be to combine the first and three identities with more than just exercise at lunch. With Saint Elias back to in-person services and my Scripture reading Monday through Friday done with “The Path” on Ancient Faith Radio, it will be easy to add spirituality to the calendar. Now I just need to set aside a time of day for my idea writing. I still don’t have a regular form for the emotional work. I also need to look for something fixed to fill that role.
Three months into the ten months of the Groundhog Day Resolutions year, this is the best start I have had. Now I need to ride that momentum into the future.
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